


Thus We Braid Strand 6 to Strand 9

by seekingferret



Category: This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:46:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28101138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: and our glorious crystal future shines so bright I gotta wear shades, as the prophets say
Comments: 6
Kudos: 41
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Thus We Braid Strand 6 to Strand 9

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AuroraCloud](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraCloud/gifts).



**A Suspiciously Effective and Cheap Remote Access Software Suite Her Hospital Purchased Two Years Ago, Which Allows The Good Doctor To Work From Home**

"Do we really need this?" the chief financial officer asked, a skeptical look on her face. "I'm not sure I see the value added. And fifty thousand credits a year is a large chunk of change. For what? So the docs can travel to golf resorts and still claim their salaries?"

"They do that anyway," the chief medical officer offered. She hoped the levity would subtly work on the CFO, making her feel like they were on the same team. Which they were supposed to be, goddamnit. But she could see it wasn't working. The CFO had no vision.

"Let's stop the golf resorts first, and then we can talk about telemedicine."

"We're going to make money on this. We would make money even if it cost five times as much, which is what software like this would cost from any other vendor. I still don't understand why that young saleswoman offered it so cheaply."

"And you don't find that suspicious?"

The CMO sighed and tried a different tack. "It will bring in new patients..."

"Shut ins?"

"Shut ins. Immunocompromised patients. Patients who don't have cars. Patient who've convinced themselves it's just a cold, not worth bothering us with. Patients whose jobs won't give them the time off to see a doctor. In an alternate universe, those patients would go without needed care, but in this universe we'll be able to connect them to the brilliant doctors and nurses and PAs in our system. It will save lives, and more importantly to you, we'll make money." She handed the CFO a printout, a couple of pages of graphs projecting potential earnings from telemedicine. It was ninety percent wishful thinking and the remaining ten percent bullshit, they both knew. But the CMO would get what she wanted from the board, even without the CFO's support.

"Okay, you can take it to the board with my recommendation. But I'm only recommending offering them a two year contract, with an out for us after six months. If it works out after that, we can renew, but I don't want us to be stuck paying for garbage software our doctors won't even use. The key to good business is preserving all our options for as long as possible."

**Engine Trouble**

The bloody car was more trouble than it was worth. It was a splurge, one of the first well-reviewed automatic drivers out on the market, and when it worked it was great. She could read her journals on the way to work, or catch up on patient records, without having to worry about traffic lights or road detours. It had already earned her investment back by delivering her to the hospital stress-free most days.

But there was something wrong with the electronic fuel injection. Every few hundred miles it would stall out and she'd have to call the dealer to have it reprogrammed. It was almost funny, that of all the cutting edge software on the vehicle, it was a decades-old injection timing algorithm that was broken. It would have been funny if it were anyone else's car, but she'd had to call for tech support too many times, and now she was going to be late for work. 

She phoned tech support at the dealership and got a new voice she'd never heard before. Ordinarily, the dealership could remotely log into her car, analyze the recent fuel combustion data, and force it to update the parameters that should have been automatically updating. It took a bit of time, but it had become routine. But today the technician told her that the remote connection wasn't working. They needed to bring the car to the dealership to perform the software update. A tow truck would be there in forty five minutes; if she could arrange her own transportation there was no need for her to stay with the vehicle.

Every day a new inconvenience emerging from a new convenience: the true circle of life. Was the future really just a restatement of the past? Was it just an endless dance with variation without any real change? Or could something new actually emerge that made lives better? The jury was still out, she thought, exiting her car.

**A Good Spring Day**

The wind whistled gently through the sycamores, a melody deeply familiar from childhood. It was early spring, the air was crisp, and the leaves were only starting to grow in. In a few weeks the air would be fragrant with all the scents of the spring bloom, and in a few weeks more the mugginess of summer would swamp her. She was wearing a thick wool sweater, because right now it was a good ten degrees warmer than it was supposed to be. She pulled off the sweater and tied it around her waist, whisling along with the trees. She tried to be frustrated about her car, but it was hard to be angry on a day like today. She phoned her assistant and asked her to delay her first patient by a half hour. Auto troubles, no big deal. 

There were two choices she could consider. First, call a taxi, or call a co-worker, and get a ride to the hospital. She wouldn't mind waiting ten or fifteen minutes in this weather for them to arrive. Second, walk home, less than two kilometres away, and handle her appointments virtually. She had been skeptical of the Project Cinnabar software when the hospital had first implemented it two years earlier, but the bloody thing worked. It worked miraculously. Video processing algorithms read microfluctations in the patient's face and told her body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure. The video quality was better than anything consumer streaming apps supported, so good it put her patients at ease. She would have given up on going into the hospital at all, but there was still value in being among her colleagues, putting hands on patients, so she tried to stop in at least once a week. But she could skip a week. Nobody who mattered would care. 

There were two choices she could consider, but anyone who knew her would know that it wasn't meaningfully a choice. There was only one way she would decide. Only one way the neurons firing would run their way along the many-branching pathways in her brain. She carefully double checked to make sure her car was off, the parking brake engaged, the doors all locked. Then she started home.

**She's Important**

She had been planning to review a paper from the Medical Society's journal on the ride into work, but she wasn't able to read and walk at the same time, so instead she thought about a different paper she'd read last week, about a rare, newly discovered pathogen. She could visualize its protein structure in her head, the fiendish way it tricked its way past the body's initial immune defenses. It was patient and slow moving, and almost selective in who it chose to attack. There wasn't a lot of money out there for researching diseases like that, but maybe if she found the right patron she could pry loose some grant money to study it. She thought it was worth it. The mechanisms described in the paper were so unusual that she was sure to learn something by sequencing it. 

She started mentally organizing the grant proposal: the letters of support she would need, the preliminary results to gather, the collaborators she would have to sell on the idea. A bluebird tailing her overhead started to sing. She registered its screechy, trilling sounds in a buried part of her hindbrain that slowly crept toward the foreground. Clinical results, she needed some of those too. She might need to make this an international project, if the national case total wasn't sufficient. 

It would be a selling job, she knew. Research priorities were always subject to the vagaries of politics and the fads of the day. And even a more purely rational system might not prioritize this work, preferring to put focus on immediate threats. Cure the common cold and cancer, then worry about obscurities. But there was often unexpected light in obscurities. It seemed like the bluebird was continuing to follow her. She had the kind of mind that sniffed out hidden treasures, sensed them and kept pursuing them until they were out in the open. That was her in her diagnostic work, diligently fighting for her patients' health, and she tried to exercise the same intuitions in the laboratory.

**More to the Point, Her Sister's Children Will Be, If She Visits Them This Afternoon and They Discuss Patterns in Birdsong**

"Oh!" her sister exclaimed, when she ducked her head through the door. "You're earlier than I expected you to be. The kids are in the basement playing a board game."

"The hospital's shut down. There was a bomb threat. Latest word is no sign of an actual bomb, but they've evacuated all the patients and they turned off the remote access to the computer system while they check. The new patient I was supposed to meet this morning has been rescheduled for tomorrow."

"Oh, how terrible. I hope it truly is a fake."

"Me too. I think I'll take the kids outside today. The weather has chosen to be unexpectedly lovely, in compensation."

"You might need to entice them."

"Consider it done." She maneuvered past a pile of neglected toys down a narrow staircase into the well-lit basement. They're delighted to see her, but they didn't look up. They were too focused on the game, which likely would take another fifteen minutes to complete. It was a military strategy game, a simulation of war on an imaginary planet. The planet's geography shifts every time the game is played, as tiles are randomly placed on the game board. This particular game is generally considered too advanced for children of their ages, but they have been playing it for years. She sat in silence watching the interplay of pieces across the board, gradually seeing how the individual moves fill into two individual, clashing strategies. Her nephew would win, she sensed. 

Their moves continued toward their inevitable conclusion. She stopped focusing on the game play and started to study the game players. Her nephew was a studious fifteen year old, quietly intense, with a face that was just asymmetric enough to be disarming. He considered every action he took carefully, analyzing the angles, and then he moved decisively. Her seventeen year old niece was similar in many ways, as thoughtful as her brother, but more intuitive. She made her moves more quickly, sensitive to the rhythm and pace of the game. As her positions faltered, her pace did not slow. Her freckled face showed no loss of confidence. The two of them had a grasp for the utilization of power that was going to mean something someday. Finally, her last territory was captured by enemy mechs and the game was over. She smiled and congratulated her brother. 

"Come with me," the doctor said the moment the game was over, standing up and beckoning her sister's children out of the basement. "It's a beautiful day and I want you to see the birds." They followed obediently, without any enticement, making their way past her sister to the door. Her sister was not a part of her relationship with her sister's children. She had never really understood her sister, though she did love her, and her sister loved her. But she understood her sister's children. 

An obscenely fat robin sat in the dewy grass, barely moving. A lithe hawk glided past the leaves of an oak tree. A bluebird, which might be the same one as before, sang a very different song than the one she'd heard earlier. This time it sounded prettier, less abrasive. 

"What do we know about birdsong?" she asked them. "Is it a language? An autonomic habit? An artistic endeavor? You know, there are scientists who have devoted their whole lives to trying to answer this question. They hide microphones across habitats, capture birds to see if their songs change in captivity, categorize distinct sound forms and take detailed notes of the circumstances in which each sound form occurs. They've been hunting relentlessly for the pattern that will unlock meaning."

"Like you and viruses," her niece said.

"Like me and disease," she corrected. "The deeper patterns of viruses and bacteria express themselves in disease, just like the deeper mental patterns of the birds express themselves in birdsong. But you know what's funny?"

"What?"

"I don't think like a scientist when I listen to birds sing. I just hear the music."

For no particularly meaningful reason, her sister's children will remember this observation when they have become people of significance. In the meantime, the three of them sprawled on the grass and enjoyed the sunlight and the songs of the birds.

**Which She Will Have Done Already By The Time You Decipher This Note**

She tried logging in to the Project Cinnabar system the minute she got home, but it was down. She pulled her phone out of her handbag to call her assistant, only to see that she'd missed a message from her. A bomb scare at the hospital! Still no idea if there really was a bomb. It seemed that she was fortunate her engine had picked today of all days to fail. Oh, well. With time freed up, she'd start researching her new project idea. And maybe she'd visit her sister this afternoon and see her niece and nephew. 

And in an empty examination room, a patient waited for a doctor who would not come, and dreamt of a different future that would not come.


End file.
